


She Wonders

by thelma_throwaway



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Gen, Post-Divorce, Two Sides to Every Story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-25
Updated: 2020-03-25
Packaged: 2021-03-01 03:02:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 456
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23318050
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thelma_throwaway/pseuds/thelma_throwaway
Summary: She wonders if her daughter will blame her.
Relationships: Leonard "Bones" McCoy/ Jocelyn McCoy
Kudos: 11





	She Wonders

**Author's Note:**

> Written in 2009, presented without edits, from my long defunct LiveJournal.
> 
> Looking back this piece is surprisingly emotionally literate for a 17 year old!

Joceyln lights a cigarette. She wonders if her daughter will blame her. Len always told her not to smoke.

That’s how they met. She was blowing smoke rings through a cardboard tube and he told her she’d die like that. She’ll die of old age, but not till much, much later. They date, in the normal fashion, and they marry, in the normal fashion. She isn’t pregnant and he isn’t drunk, but they are both within the next two weeks. After Jocelyn signs the check for her spring semester at med school, she vomits. Len brings her ginger ale and midnight snacks and flushes her cigarettes when she throws the test at him.

"YOU," she yells, though they’re supposed to be happy.

"Us," Leonard says. "Us."

She watches Joanna cut the hair off a Barbie doll. She wonders if her daughter will blame her.

She misses her anatomy final to give birth. They pry the study PADD from her hand as the contractions grew closer and closer. Leonard sitts with her after, flushed with post-exam endorphins, cradling their baby and her general practitioner comes in, asking how it went.

"Aced it," Leonard says with a grin.

Jocelyn sells the house. She wonders if her daughter will blame her. They repaint every room eggshell and mow.

Leonard is graduating and Jocelyn is shitting their money down the tubes. She struggles through her classes, her residency, barely seeing her daughter, barely seeing anything. Joanna is five.

Jocelyn is teetering, stumbling and catching as she goes, bending for books and PADDs and empty juice boxes and tiny little jumpers with tiny little stains that infuriate her, while Leonard is scooping everything up behind her. Folding and flying and feeding Joanna spoonfuls of peas while she scratches her neck and chants. _Calcaneus_ , _capitulum_ , _patella_ , _radius_ , _metatarsel_ …

And she hates him.

School sends Joanna home with a pink slip. She wonders if her daughter will blame her. She asks what they are for, and Joanna says fighting. Fighting over what, she wants to say, but is afraid Joanna will say over nothing, just like you and dad.

Len drinks and Jocelyn screams over it. They don’t touch, shying from hips and knees and stray fingers straining for the creamer. Her mother dies and Len holds her hand, they kiss before bed. They grow and spring apart. They snap and stumble.

"Mine," they both yell.

But it’s hers.

Joanna bites a classmate

It’s all hers.

Her student loans and lawyer’s bills hang from a chain around her neck.

It’s hers.

Everyone blames with their eyes. Creases and tilts that say _fault_.

All hers.

Len moves away, from custody and care.

Hers.

She feels cheated.

She wonders if her daughter will blame her.


End file.
